-----Original Message-----
From: Carol Wells [
mailto:cwells@igc.org]Sent: Saturday, November 26, 2011 11:46 PM
To: cwells@igc.org
Subject: Time to Support Occupy LA!!!
Friends,
Now is the time to get out and support Occupy Los Angeles! Whether you have been over to the Los Angeles encampment or not, this is the time to go!! They need everyone's support NOW!!!
Head over there anytime this weekend or, better yet, go on Sunday night between 10pm - 2am. Although it is very likely that many of the occupiers will get arrested, we don't have to if we choose not to. But our presence will be felt and appreciated simply by being there. We will be witness, and a non-violent voice in support of the 99%!! Bring songs, dancing bodies, poetry and stand in solidarity with all that has been happening around the country!!
And, help to stop the city's eviction of the occupiers from City Hall!
With a huge show of solidarity, we could make it embarrassing and even impossible for Occupy LA to be broken up! For more information, check out occupylosangeles.org. and come downtown!
Forward this widely!
The email addresses of the Mayor and members of the L.A. City Council are below.
PETITION:
To the Mayor and Los Angeles City Council Members:
I pledge my support for Occupy Los Angeles' right to encamp on the city hall lawn. Those participating in the encampment are exercising a fundamental form of expressive speech, protected by the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. The Occupation itself is a protected form of expression that effectively calls attention to our need for economic change, social justice and political accountability. The Occupation will carry on its mission on the city hall grounds, where it can be seen, heard and felt, until such wrongs are addressed.
Signed,
Name:
Zip Code:
Email:
Emails of the Mayor & Council Members:
mayor@lacity.org
councilmember.Krekorian@lacity.org
councilmember.zine@lacity.org
councilmember.Labonge@lacity.org
paul.koretz@lacity.org
councilmember.cardenas@lacity.org
councilmember.alarcon@lacity.org
councilmember.parks@lacity.org
Jan.Perry@lacity.org
councilmember.wesson@lacity.org
councilman.rosendahl@lacity.org
councilmember.englander@lacity.org
councilmember.garcetti@lacity.org
councilmember.huizar@lacity.org
* * *
Hi. On Friday, 11/2 5, Democracy Now broadcast exemplary presentations at a recent panel, hosted by The Nation Magazine. I chose two to send you, together, as capturing the history, possibilities and problems of this new mass movement. I'll send talks by Naomi Klein, Patrick Bruner and Michael Moore in another emailing.AMY GOODMAN: We continue with William Greider. He is a contributor to The Nation magazine, author of Who Will Tell the People: The Betrayal of American Democracy, and most recently, Come Home, America: The Rise and Fall (and Redeeming Promise) of Our Country. William Greider.
WILLIAM GREIDER: The American pulse for democracy, the thirst for equality, for freedom, is a little like an underground river that has run underneath the surfaces of American history from the beginning. And it rarely is visible, at least to the established powers. It gets misled, deflected, stymied in different ways. But it continues these ideals, the original promise of what this country could be. And I told myself, "OK, I don't know if anything changes now. It doesn't seem to be happening. But I'm going to—I'm going to be in that stream with the others, the historic stream, and do what I can and at least keep the candle lit and aloft." And that's a good thing to do with your life. Then, sometime, often unpredictably, this underground river gathers force, and it breaks through to the surface, and everything is changed. And you can read American history and find those moments, which changed everything and opened a vista of a different country. I think that's what we're experiencing right now. I literally mean that. And I think it's—we know it's a high-risk enterprise to try to build an authentic social movement. Many arise and fail, or get crushed. And the ideas are literally pushed back out of the public square. But they go back—they continue somehow and maybe come back a generation or two generations later. So we have to—I think we have to take that sort of long view of what we're doing.
I feel—because I know a lot of that history, I see an ironic resemblance between what's happening right now and the Populist movement of the late 19th century—1870s, 1880s, 1890s. And I'll tell you some of why I feel that. These were farmers, in the South and Midwest mostly, who were being crushed. I mean, literally stripped of their property and turned into peasants by pretty much the same interests we're up against today: the rise of industrial capitalism, the money trust, the bankers, and just the hard prejudices of American society. And yet they rose among themselves. They knew—they knew this about their situation: nobody was on their side, certainly not the moneyed classes and the economic system, and not the government either. So if they were going to change anything, it had to come out of themselves. And they started having meetings, first in Texas, and the idea spread. And it's a long, wonderful story. I urge you to check out Lawrence Goodwyn's history, called The Populist Moment. I promise you will be inspired about the capacity of American potential, and you will also understand how hard it is to do what we're trying to do. And Larry Goodwyn is a student, a stern student, of social movements. Nothing sentimental about the man. And he understands how hard it is to make this happen. And he's described in great detail—I won't go through here—the stages of development that keep a movement centered on what it really wants to be and in fighting off the opposing forces. Think about what we're hearing from these folks in the Occupy zones. It's very similar. We have to do this for ourselves. In fact, we intend to do it for ourselves. Very old American virtue, self-reliance. And it should be the core of what we are building here now. I think the Populist failed in concrete terms, but they set out to solve the problems for themselves, and they built a series of ingenious co-operatives, agricultural co-operatives mostly, but also credit and so forth, which were ultimately destroyed by the moneyed classes, bankers. But out of that, they developed bigger ideas—I mean, really bigger ideas—about how to change this country, and then lost politically. But I would ask—we should ask ourselves—what are we building? What is it we can build that's parallel to that co-operative movement? And I think the—I think we're already seeing the answer to that in McPherson Square in Washington and on Wall Street and dozens of other places. The paper I worked for many years ago has got a competitor now in Washington called The Occupied Washington Post, and it pleases me greatly to see that. But now—and they had a — The Occupied Washington Post has a poster-type headline: "We Stand with the Majority, For Human Needs, Not Corporate Greed." That's a pretty good start on a program, I think. And—but I think the—I think what we're seeing now, in our construction, is beginning, believe it or not, to convince even the Washington Post. They have—if you check it out, in the style section today, they have a marvelous map of the McPherson Square encampment, done by hand with a kind of artist's style and little labels of this and that and so forth. It's quite beautiful. And accompanying it is one of their critics, an architecture critic, with can only be called a sincere appreciation of what he sees in McPherson Square. And it's the model of how this society could be organized. That's—it's—people are going to all say this: "What a powerful teacher! Takes my breath away." Now, in my last book, Come Home, America, oddly titled, I sort of playfully fantasized that what America needs is what we could call clubs for America, lots of them, millions of them, really, people just coming together and having conversations. And one of my young friends, who's a labor organizer, said, "Well, who's going to organize this?" And I kind of shrugged and said, "The people will." And he looked at me and rolled his eyes, like, you know, that's nice. And we moved on to other subjects. But guess what. That's who's organizing this thing: the people.
RICHARD KIM: Yeah.
WILLIAM GREIDER: And isn't there—I mean—
RICHARD KIM: So, Bill?
WILLIAM GREIDER: There's something miraculous about that. And Larry Goodwyn, who's taught me so much, says this is hard to do. Movements fail. Most do not reach their goals. But they begin in what he likes to call democratic conversation. And I don't even ask him what he means by that, because he has said to me—not always, but on a couple of occasions — "We have just had a democratic conversation." And I think, "Goddamn" —
RICHARD KIM: But Rinku, to you, Patrick has talked about how this has sort of been built on the shoulders of other movements, and you've been there in other movements, fighting for immigration rights, anti-racist movements—
RINKU SEN: I was wondering how far back you were going to go.
RICHARD KIM: —movements around homelessness and poverty. You know, in the early days, Occupy Wall Street was criticized by some people for being a sort of white, middle-class, college thing. There was a sort of infamous incident when civil rights activist and congressman John Lewis was prevented from speaking at a Occupy meeting in Atlanta. But since then, you know, I have seen a lot of great collaborations. Occupy Wall Street has gone up to protest many times "stop and frisk" policies in Harlem, putting their bodies on the line. What do you think, you know, is here, in terms of the potential for collaboration? And what are the tensions, right, between this new force in American politics and, you know, those organizations that have been really working for decades in the trenches?
RINKU SEN: So, you know, you know that saying and that thing that people do in families when they want to say how much they love each other, they say, "I love you this much," and they make their arms really big to indicate that there's a lot of love there? There's—a friend of mine has done something different with that, where she says to her—the kids that she takes care of, she says to them, "I love you this much." Can you all see my gesture? And so, instead of putting her arms out, she puts two fingers together, because nothing can come between us. "I love you this much, because nothing can come between us." And contradictorily, I think that the relationship between existing movement—existing organizations and the Occupy movement has to be both. It has to be about love that's this much and has some distance and love that's like this and has no distance, where nobody can come between us. And that's because I think that the Occupy movement has—needs to have some autonomy. It does. And I really think it was very, very smart not to have demands, you know, right out the gate. It's not a campaign. So, organizations do campaigns, and movements do something else. They shift the public will. And so, the Occupy movement has to retain its ability to do its primary job, as I understand it, which is to keep shifting the public will and making that psychic break happen and supporting that psychic break. And at the very same time, it has to be like this, with all the people in communities—working people, unions, homeless people, tenants, immigrants—who have been struggling for so long to make particular things happen and to get back some of the stuff that was stolen from us. So, at the very same time, you have to have this kind of distance and autonomy and be operating like in this way, where nothing can get in between occupiers and all of the people who have been fighting for a long time.
On race and diversity, the main thing I want to say is that diversity, by itself, is not enough. It's not actually enough for the Occupy movement to be racially diverse, which it is. I know many, many people of color who are very invested in their local occupations, who have shown up, who have slept on site, who are bringing food and supplies and water and leading marches and so on. So the people of color, from my perception, whether it started that way or not, we are there now, and we are part of the movement, and we claim the movement. And yet, it isn't enough that there are simply bodies of color and faces of color in the park, in the plaza, in any plaza. The real question is, are those people who are there able to influence the agendas of local occupations? In particular, are they able to help people who are attracted to Occupy Wall Street get moved back out to all of the organizations and campaigns and efforts to really win things? Because I know you're attracting a ton of people, and they're going to do work. They, you know, can't hang out at a park all day long; there must be other things that need to happen. Well, maybe you can all day long. But the next day, it seems like maybe there might be room to make something happen.
And it's like, you know, when you go to a party. You get invited to a party, and maybe you like the person pretty well and respect the person who invited you to the party. You go to the party, and you don't like the music, but you have no ability to change it, and it makes your head pound. So the DJ doesn't take requests, and the iPod is like glued into the system, and you can't get it out. If that's the case, you don't like the music, and you have no ability to change it, you're not going to hang out at that party very long. You're going to leave and either make your own party or go home, I guess. So, the question is not really, can you get the people of color to the party? It's, can they change the music in a way that helps them stay at the party?
And I think that if Occupy Wall Street is going to cause this public shift, a really significant part of that shift has to be the ability to recognize the role that racial discrimination, racial exploitation, racial hierarchy played in getting us to this very depression, not just historically, but 10, 15, five years ago, last month, the ways in which redlining and mortgage theft and predatory lending and long-term employment discrimination and housing discrimination got us to the place where our economic systems do not work for anybody, including struggling white people. That didn't—struggling white people weren't—many have always been struggling, but there's—you know, I was saying in the green room that the 99 percent used to be the 98 percent, and somewhere in that 1 percent are some white people, you know? And they would not have—they wouldn't be moving into the 99 percent if in fact there had not been a whole set of mechanisms and structures that were actually designed to take stuff from people of color and to disenfranchise people of color, that then ultimately always, always, always bled out to affect everybody else.
RICHARD KIM: Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Rinku Sen of Applied Research Center and publisher of ColorLines. Before that, Patrick Bruner, one of the organizers of Occupy Wall Street, and Michael Moore, Oscar-winning filmmaker, as well as author of Here Comes Trouble. Coming up, William Greider and Naomi Klein. Stay with us.
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